Amit Goldenberg discusses a new paper he co-authored that looks at the brain architecture commonalities of people who join and participate in extreme political acts.
Amit Goldenberg
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Research has shown that when speaking in front of a group, people’s attention tends to gets stuck on the most emotional faces, causing them to overestimate the group’s average emotional state. In this piece, the authors share two additional findings: First, the larger the group, the greater this attention bias. Second, the attention bias is stronger for faces expressing negative emotions than for faces expressing positive ones, meaning that our ability to judge a group’s emotional state isn’t just skewed towards more intense emotions — it is specifically biased toward more negative evaluations. Based on these findings, the authors suggest that when giving a talk or meeting a large group of people, we should attempt to intentionally scan the audience more evenly in order to counteract our natural attention biases and get a more accurate picture of the group’s overall emotional state.
Amit Goldenberg is an assistant professor in the Negotiation Organization & Markets unit and a psychologist by training. Amit's research focuses on the role of emotions in social interactions, particularly in the context of social and political issues. One line of work examines emotional dynamics between people and their contribution to group behavior such as conflicts and collective action. A second line of work focuses on how social interactions contribute to the regulation of emotions. A third line of work focuses on specifically on the interaction between emotions and technology.
- Featured Work
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Amit Goldenberg discusses a new paper he co-authored that looks at the brain architecture commonalities of people who join and participate in extreme political acts.Research has shown that when speaking in front of a group, people’s attention tends to gets stuck on the most emotional faces, causing them to overestimate the group’s average emotional state. In this piece, the authors share two additional findings: First, the larger the group, the greater this attention bias. Second, the attention bias is stronger for faces expressing negative emotions than for faces expressing positive ones, meaning that our ability to judge a group’s emotional state isn’t just skewed towards more intense emotions — it is specifically biased toward more negative evaluations. Based on these findings, the authors suggest that when giving a talk or meeting a large group of people, we should attempt to intentionally scan the audience more evenly in order to counteract our natural attention biases and get a more accurate picture of the group’s overall emotional state.
- Journal Articles
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- Goldenberg, Amit, Erika Weisz, Timothy D. Sweeney, Mina Cikara, and James Gross. "The Crowd Emotion Amplification Effect." Psychological Science 32, no. 3 (March 2021): 437–450. View Details
- Wang, Ke, Amit Goldenberg, Charles Dorison, Jeremy Miller, Jennifer Lerner, and James Gross. "A Global Test of Brief Reappraisal Interventions on Emotions During the COVID-19 Pandemic." Nature Human Behaviour (forthcoming). View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, and James J. Gross. "Digital Emotion Contagion." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24, no. 4 (April 2020): 316–328. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, Timothy D. Sweeny, Emmanuel Shpigel, and James J. Gross. "Is This My Group or Not? The Role of Ensemble Coding of Emotional Expressions in Group Categorization." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 149, no. 3 (March 2020). View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, David Garcia, Eran Halperin, and James J. Gross. "Collective Emotions." Current Directions in Psychological Science 29, no. 2 (April 2020): 154–160. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, David Garcia, Eran Halperin, Jamil Zaki, Danyang Kong, Golijeh Golarai, and James J. Gross. "Beyond Emotional Similarity: The Role of Situation-specific Motives." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 149, no. 1 (January 2020): 138–159. View Details
- Editorials
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- Goldenberg, Amit, and Erika Weisz. "Don’t Focus on the Most Expressive Face in the Audience." Harvard Business Review (website) (November 30, 2020). View Details
- Book Chapters
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- Wolf, Svenja A., Amit Goldenberg, and Mickaël Campo. "Emotions and Emotion Regulation." In The New Psychology of Sport & Exercise: The Social Identity Approach, edited by S. Alexander Haslam, Katrien Fransen, and Filip Boen, 147–164. London: SAGE Publications, 2020. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, J. J. Gross, and Eran Halperin. "The Group Malleability Intervention: Addressing Intergroup Conflicts by Changing Perceptions of Outgroup Malleability." Chap. 15 in Handbook of Wise Interventions: How Social Psychology Can Help People Change, edited by Gregory M. Walton and Alia J. Crum. New York, NY: Guilford Press, 2020. View Details
- Presentations
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- Goldenberg, Amit. "Collective Emotions." Emotions and Strategy: A Multi-Disciplinary Conversation at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, May 2020. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, and J. J. Gross. "Network Selection Strategies." Paper presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Convention, New Orleans, LA, February 2020. View Details
- Additional Information
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